In a World of Disconnection and Dopamine, Attention Is Resistance
And why walking with a podcast might be costing you your community. (Estimated reading time: 4 minutes)
The fourth in a four-part series on attention inspired by some recent readings.
“In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention —presence isn’t just a virtue; it’s a radical act.” - Pico Iyer
Addressing our crisis of social fragmentation begins with considering the matter of attention. Over the past three posts, we’ve explored the primacy of attention, its capture by the Attention Economy, and our collective back-turning to community-supporting interactions.
But let’s end on a hopeful note. We have plenty of reasons to do so, since we have a lot of agency over how we wield our attention. It’s a muscle. We can train it and develop fitness.
In fact, in a world that can feel overwhelming and outside of our control, how we direct our attention is one of the few things we truly have leverage over.
Our attentional capacity is a matter close to my heart. I’ve been a practicing Zen Buddhist for almost 25 years. Zen practice is really just an exercise in how to bring our attention to the present moment. I’ve spent long hours grappling with how my attention ebbs, flows, and can be redirected by internal and external forces. I’ve learned that even a little intention towards our attention can go a long way.
But you don’t need to be Zen Buddhist to exercise your attention muscles and break the grip of the attention economy. For example, secular groups like the New York City-based Strother School of Radical Attention are raising awareness and creating programs to help people cultivate their attentional capacity. Consider checking out their Substack, the Empty Cup.
One good place to start is limiting the allure of our devices. Their constant drip of fleeting dopamine hits has turned us into attentional couch potatoes. With weakened attentional capacity, it’s harder for us to attend to the slower, subtler, but more meaningful real world of people and places.
With weakened attentional capacity, it’s harder for us to attend to the slower, subtler, but more meaningful real world of people and places.
So we can turn off notifications, delete apps, or just get a simpler phone altogether.
We can also make choices that lean into people and presence rather than our sequestering self-interests.
For example, why do we see walking AND listening to a podcast as a net life gain? There’s a subtle but profound cultural toxicity encouraging us to life-hack our days by maximizing the things we consume. We engage in this multitasking fallacy — speeding up our life and dividing our attention — at the expense of a boundless source of joy: the world right in front of us, right now.
Pico Iyer, quoted above, suggests that happiness comes from just being fully absorbed in whatever we are doing. If we are washing the dishes, just wash the dishes. If you are talking with someone, just be with them.
And as we traverse our community places, our relation to others around us is also worthy of our full attention. Our surrounding community-life not just some neutral background we can ignore. In fact, our inattention accelerates the degeneration of our social fabric.
Our surrounding community-life not just some neutral background we can ignore. In fact, our inattention accelerates the degeneration of our social fabric.
Let’s see and attend to our relationality. This is community-mindedness.
So we would do well to consider Linda Tropp’s concept of “psychology generosity,” which encourages us to direct our attention towards others and embrace small interactions, like smiling or striking up a conversation. Our spirits will reward us.
But while individual decisions are important, such framing can also be a trap. Like the illusion that individual choices can help stop climate change. Or how the focus on consumer-based recycling provided cover for the plastic industry to inundate our environment with single-use plastics.
So besides our personal choices, we also need to consider how to support broader structural changes. As they say, “Don’t just agonize — organize.”
In the arena of civic renewal, this means investing in and attending to neighborhood-based social structures that reclaim our time from our screens and instead foster social connection. Things like place-based clubs, associations, institutions, events, and spaces. Examples abound.
When we regularly participate in such spirit-affirming community-building entities, the shallow dopamine hits from our cellphones lose their currency. And we deepen the mental tracks that allow us to travel in the slower lanes of real-life connection and place.
Rather than a life oriented to our devices and media bubbles, we can orient ourselves in relation to a common world. This is the fundamental essence of community: our concurrence.
The New York Times closed out 2024 with a piece titled “12 Predictions for Life in 2025.” On top of their list was “A Turning Point in the War for Attention.” Says reporter Emma Goldberg:
“If our thoughts this year have felt like pinballs in a machine — clattering, bopping and bouncing in all directions at the mercy of incessant smartphone notifications — 2025 will be when we reset the game . Next year may be a turning point in the war for attention, a moment when many “Marie Kondo” their minds and see what joy might be sparked by clearing out the meme clutter.”
I sure hope she is right. And I hope the future will bring about not only more individual joy, but more attention to place-based community life.
There really isn’t route out of the wreckage without, well, looking up, and addressing our precious faculty of attention.
Tell me what *we* pay attention to, and I will tell you who *we* are.
WHAT ELSE I’M READING
“You're Being Rude. Put Away Your Phone: New manners for a post-smartphone society” by Robinson Meyer
“If we want to escape our current social, political, and even economic mess, then we will need to clean up this attentional Superfund site first.”
If someone were to ask me, “Tell me how you really feel about smartphones,” I couldn’t do better than point to this recent piece by
in his Substack The Argument. This is the perfect follow-up to my above post. Meyer doesn’t hold back on how we need to culturally course-correct when it comes to smartphones. Amen! Don’t miss this one!“Reclaiming Conversation in the Face of AI” by Sherry Turkle
“The performance of pretend emotion does not make machines more human. But it challenges what we think makes people special. Our human identity is something we need to reclaim for ourselves.”
Responding to the rise of AI chatbots, Sherry Turkle eloquently explores the essence of empathy and human connection. This is the preface to the upcoming reissue of her book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. I haven’t read it (yet), but it seems highly relevant to the work of community engagement and community building.
“What is Good Attention” in The Empty Cup
“Attention Activism” [is] the cultivation of forms of solidarity to push back against the exploitative commodification of human attention, which we think is at odds with human flourishing.
Right on cue, a great recent post from the folks at the Strother School of Radical Attention in their Substack, The Empty Cup. This interview with German philosopher and professor Sebastian Watzl is a provocative philosophical exploration of the ethics and academic study of “attention.”
DO YOU HAVE A STORY TO SHARE?
Do you have a great example of how a community engagement process helped a community restitch its social fabric, or go from “Us vs Them” to “We.” Or, an example of how a community engagement process went off the rails? I’m collecting stories, and I’d love to talk to you. Please reach out.
This is excellent, thank you for this entire series.